


It's Only Time (And You Know I'll Wait)

by iris_impossible



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M, Fix-It, Fix-It of Sorts, Force Bond (Star Wars), Force Ghost(s), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Pining, Post-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 04:00:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,175
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21946966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iris_impossible/pseuds/iris_impossible
Summary: She refuses to believe it. She screws her eyes shut even as the part of her that has felt dead and numb begins to tingle painfully back to life.“No,” she says. “You’re not here.”“You’re right. Do you want me to go?”His voice is soft but there. She rolls over. He’s standing beside her bed, except not really. The person is gone but his essence, shimmering and pale, is looking down on her so tenderly that new tears spring to her eyes.
Relationships: Kylo Ren/Rey, Rey/Ben Solo, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 21
Kudos: 335
Collections: TROS Reylo Fix-it Fics





	It's Only Time (And You Know I'll Wait)

_I’d never felt so alone._

Rey lies curled up her side, unable to sleep again, staring at the wall but not seeing it. Looking past it into another time and place, almost able to smell the sharp smoke of the fire and the salt of the waves crashing at the rock outside. She’d always known she was lonely. How could she not, when sometimes she went so many days without speaking to another person that her voice cracked and broke when she finally did. But she’d never realized how deep the wound went until the yawning hole that had lived somewhere behind her sternum all her life was suddenly filled.

 _You’re not alone_ , he’d said and, for the first time, it had been true.

With the touch of their hands, her fate had been sealed.

***

“We’ve had a message from Delta quadrant,” Poe says to the group assembled around the table, standing just beside the place where Leia stood, not quite ready to take her place. “They’re requesting assistance with…”

There’s so much to be done now. It turns out that defeating the Final Order and freeing the galaxy wasn’t the end of the journey, only the beginning. Suddenly rebels have to become leaders, and it’s not a mantle that sits comfortable on any of their shoulders.

“Rey,” Poe says. “What do you think?”

People are looking at her, like they always are, waiting for her to bestow some kind of wisdom on them. Expecting the last of the Jedi to lead them down the right path.

But she doesn’t know how. The Force flows through her like a river, connecting her to the golden, invisible web that cradles the entire universe, but it doesn’t teach her how to lead. How to set up a government or allocate resources or even how to talk to people now that they look at her like she’s something so apart from them. She may be the last of the Jedi, but she’s still just a young, uneducated girl from a nothing backwater of a planet.

She thought this part would be different. She thought…

She woke up with arms around her, and at first she thought it was a dream. She used to go to sleep like that in her little shelter on Jakku, holding her arms tightly around herself to ward off the cold but also because, when she squeezed her eyes shut, she could almost, _almost_ make herself believe those arms belonged to someone else. Later, after Ahch-to, she sometimes bolted awake up feeling the ghost of an embrace fading from her skin, her hands reaching for something that wasn’t there.

But this feeling didn’t fade. She opened her eyes, and he was there. He lifted her up, arms solid beneath her and the look in his eyes as he drank her in as soft and warm and sustaining as freshly baked bread. The bond that had always felt like a stream constantly flowing between them was now an ocean that they both floated in. She saw her own face as he did, her plainness refined to a gleam of almost painful beauty in his eyes. She felt how his fingers tingled as they brushed the hair at the nape of her neck, the heat where her leg rested over his own. His love for her — his _adoration_ and wonder — crashing over her like a wave.

“Ben,” she whispered. His heart constricted as the name escaped her lips, and when she touched his face, she felt both his skin beneath her fingers and her own trembling fingers against his skin, the tenderness of the touch passing back and forth between them, magnified with each iteration, surrounding her until she wasn’t sure what sensation was hers and what was his anymore, the moment stretching out between them until it seemed to last forever. She was so sure that she would never, never feel lonely again. That whatever came next, they would do it together.

But then the moment had ended.

***

She tells herself it’s for the best, and she thinks she’s doing a good job of believing it. He was too broken, too haunted. It’s better for him this way, to have found the light again and to be free from everything that tormented him so much in life.

She buries the dead. She celebrates their victory. She embraces Finn and Poe and her other friends and tries to help them build something new.

But she feels like half a person. She had just a few moments of perfect completeness before it was gone, and the future she saw in that moment was so dazzling that everything else seems dim now in comparison.

She lies down in bed after another day of pretending and draws her knees up to her chest. Tears slip silently from her eyes, running over her lips, and the taste of salt on her tongue makes the memory that much more vivid.

 _I’d never felt more alone_ , she’d said, finding his dark eyes above the fire, unreadable but unwavering as they locked with hers.

“You’re not alone,” he whispers.

***

She refuses to believe it. She screws her eyes shut even as the part of her that has felt dead and numb begins to tingle painfully back to life.

“No,” she says. “You’re not here.”

“You’re right. Do you want me to go?”

His voice is soft but _there_. She rolls over. He’s standing beside her bed, except not really. The person is gone but his essence, shimmering and pale, is looking down on her so tenderly that new tears spring to her eyes. He looks younger somehow, softer with his curls brushed back from his face. This is Ben, all trace of Kylo Ren gone.

“I thought coming here would make things worse for you,” he says. “So I tried to stay away.”

“You always were a fool,” she says around the hot knot in her throat.

He smiles, and it’s only the second time she’s seen such a thing.

***

“You seem to be doing better,” Finn says as they walk toward the mess together after yet another meeting about how they’re going to fill the power vacuum the Final Order left behind.

She nods. “I am.”

“We were a little worried about you, after all you went through,” he says. “But time heals all wounds, I guess.”

“Right,” she says, looking away. She hates lying to him, even by omission. “I’m going to head outside for a little air. I’ll catch you up.”

“Save you a seat?”

She smiles and nods.

Outside the base there’s a rocky outcropping that overlooks the trees. Ben is there as soon as she sits down. She sighs and tilts her head up at the sun.

“We don’t know what we’re doing,” she says. “No matter how many meetings we have, we never get anywhere. It’s like we’re children who’ve been left home alone to run the house, but all we’re doing is play-acting.”

He sits beside her, hand resting just inches from hers on the craggy surface of the rock. “You’ll figure it out.”

“I wish you were here. You would know what to do, wouldn’t you? It’s not fair. We _needed_ you.”

“You overestimate my diplomacy skills,” he says drily. “Leading the First Order didn’t exactly require any. Trust me, it’s better this way.”

She looks at him, the indistinct outline of his face, wanting so badly to touch him and knowing she can’t.

 _Not for me_ , she thinks.

He drops his head, and she knows that he is feeling all of her longing, the sweet, sharp ache of it. She wishes the stream still flowed both ways. She can see him and speak to him, but the silent current of his soul that used catch and eddy inside of her, filling up the empty parts of her, is gone.

“I miss you,” she whispers.

“You are all I miss,” he whispers back.

***

She still falls asleep most nights with her own arms around herself, but he lies beside her and they talk until she drifts off, and he’s there when she wakes up. It’s not what she wanted, not what she glimpsed so briefly on Exegol, but it’s enough.

“Did you love me?” she asks one night when it’s dark and quiet and it feels like they’re the only ones left awake on the planet.

His face on the pillow is so close to hers that she might be able to feel him breathe if he was actually there.

“From almost the moment I saw you,” he says.

She had known, of course. She’d felt it deep in her bones every time he looked at her, even though she tried to deny it for so long, and she’d floated in it, filled up with it, as he held her in his arms that first and final time.

“Can you say the words?” she asks. “I’ve never heard anyone say the words.”

He reaches out to touch her cheek, and her chest hitches at the same time his face falls, because they both remember he can’t.

“I love you,” he breathes. “I’ll always love you.”

***

She starts to miss meetings. She’s no help in them anyway. Instead she stays in her quarters or goes for long walks on her own, anywhere she can be with him without arousing suspicion.

“You didn’t!”

“I swear!” He’s laughing, and somehow she can see the boy he once was in the way his skin crinkles around his mouth. “Crashed the damn thing right into the gate. It was not my most successful attempt at sneaking away from home.”

“How did—”

“Rey?”

She whirls around and finds Rose and Finn standing there beside the rock where she sits, giving her quizzical looks.

“Hi,” she says.

Rose tilts her head. “Whatcha doing?”

“Oh, just admiring the view.”

Finn looks out over the forest. “I guess if I grew up on Jakku, I’d still find trees pretty interesting, too.”

“Some of the techs are organizing a game of bolo-ball,” Rose says. “Want to come play?”

Rey shakes her head. “Some other time.”

“You sure?” Finn asks. “It’s gonna be fun.”

“No, thanks.”

They leave her and she turns back to Ben to find him frowning.

***

“Why did you do it?” she asks as they lie beside each other on her narrow bed.

He sighs. “The way you ask that makes it sound as though I made a choice. There was no choice for me to make.”

“But did you know? That it would kill you?”

He nods.

“Then why do it?”

“You know why.”

“I don’t!”

“What would be the point of living for me without you?” he says. “My story was over. Yours wasn’t. The universe still holds so much for you.”

She sits up. “Without you?”

“Yes.”

She chucks her pillow at him, full of rage when it passes through him. “Why do you think you needed me more than I needed you? That you… cared for me more than I cared for you?”

He just smiles. “I _know_ I did, and it was my greatest gift.”

She buries her head in her hands. “You’re impossible,” she whispers, hot tears stinging the back of her eyes.

“I also know I left you with the harder task,” he says, his voice soft beside her ear now. “And I’m sorry for that. But I’ll never be sorry for what I did.”

She drops her hands from her face and takes a shaky breath.

“I know I won’t be able to feel it,” she says. “But will you hold me tonight?”

His eyes are as dark and deep and consuming as a singularity when he nods. She lies down with her back to him and shuts her eyes tight.

“Goodnight,” he whispers, and she imagines his arm settling around her waist, the fingers of his other hand carding through her hair, his body warm and solid at her back.

***

She’s in the clearing two clicks from the base where she goes to train, sparring against a practice droid while he watches.

“Your feet are still telegraphing your movements,” he says.

She deflects a blast with her blade and risks a quick glance at him, arching one eyebrow. “Never seemed to hurt me when I was fighting you.”

He gives her a wolfish grin in return. “If you’d let me teach you, maybe you could have actually beat me.”

***

It’s one of those days where she feels everyone looking at her, conversations stilling when she walks into a room, marking her out as someone who isn’t like the rest of them. Someone they can’t understand.

It’s too much. She ducks down a corridor, headed for an empty supply closet she discovered weeks ago.

She freezes when she opens the door. It isn’t empty now. Poe and a pretty blonde tech whose name she can’t remember are inside. He has her pressed up against a dusty old storage rack, body pressed into hers, hands cupping her cheeks as he kisses her slowly and thoroughly. She has one hand fisted into his shirt, the other buried in his hair.

Rey stares.

Poe senses the intrusion and breaks apart from the girl, chuckling when he sees it’s just his friend.

“Oh, hi Rey,” he says, his kiss-reddened lips matching the girl’s flushed cheeks. “Busted.”

Rey tries to smile but her pulse is pounding so hard she can barely manage it. “Sorry to interrupt. Forget I was here.”

She hears Poe and the girl laugh as she closes the door.

She can’t shake the image of them kissing, holding onto each other. It dogs her steps all day. She’s replayed the memory of the kiss she shared with Ben so many times in her head that it’s become worn and thin, like a piece of paper too often handled. She tries to leave it be, because she knows she needs to make it last.

She wonders how many people Poe has kissed. Dozens, probably, if base gossip is anything to go by.

“Knight to B4,” Ben says.

She moves the piece across the board for him as they sit crosslegged on her bed, the chess board between them.

“Are you okay?” he asks. “You seem distracted. I’m crushing you more easily than usual.”

The words come tumbling out in a rush. “Was it a _good_ kiss?”

“What?” His voice sounds hollow, as though she’d kicked him in the stomach.

“I’d… never kissed anyone before.” She twists her fingers together, wishing she couldn’t feel the tremor in them. It wasn’t fair that she was the only one who still got nervous sometimes when they talked. “I don’t know if I did it right.”

He dips his head to catch her gaze and gives her the gentlest little half-smile she’s ever seen. “It felt right to me.”

She blinks. “Had you never…?”

He shakes his head. “Jedi training and then…”

“Oh,” she breathes.

“What do you remember?” he asks.

“You know what.”

“I know I do, but tell me anyway. Please?”

“I…” She swallows around her suddenly dry throat. “I touched your cheek. I was so happy, and scared, and I could feel that you were too. I don’t remember which one of us moved first—“

“It was you.”

She huffs a little laugh. “Okay. I kissed you. And I could feel what you felt, how much— how much you had _longed_ for that moment and how special I was in your eyes and it…” She can almost feel it again, the warm press of his mouth against hers, the sensation of his breath ghosting over her lips and mingling with her own.

Ben’s eyes have fallen closed.

“Gods, it’s so unfair that you can feel my memories and I can’t feel yours,” she says. “Not when we’ll never be able to touch again.”

His smile is wry and sad at the same time. “Not being able to touch you is the one major downside of death.”

She considers that for a moment. “What about”—she puts one hand on her cheek and focuses on sending the sensation down the stream—“this? Can you feel this?”

His expression is suddenly pained. “Yes,” he breathes.

She trails her hand across her face, over her jawline and down her neck, pausing over her racing pulse.

“Rey…” he whispers, his eyes ablaze.

She pulls the bands out of her hair, running her fingers through it the way she never did to him. Those thick curls that always begged to be touched, pushed out of his eyes, and she never had the chance to actually do it. She cups the back of her neck the way he was when she woke up and then drags her fingers across her collarbone.

“Move this thing,” he says, his voice low, nodding at the chess board. She knocks it to the floor, pieces scattering everywhere, and he moves closer to her. “Lie down.”

She does, body thrumming. He lies beside her and carefully raises one hand to her lips. She raises her own hand to the same spot, her solid hand merging into his ghostly one, and presses a lingering kiss to her fingers. Beside her, she hears his breath go ragged.

Following his lead, she begins to map every inch of her body, fingertips skimming between her breasts and across her stomach, palms sliding up her thighs and gripping her hips, clothing removed piece by piece until everything she touches is skin. Dizzy and breathless, she’s almost able to feel the callouses of his fingers against her.

“You’re perfect,” he whispers in her ear. “Treasure beyond any price.”

***

“I thought we could look for shooting stars,” she says as he sits down beside her on the blanket she laid on the grass outside the base.

“Where is everyone?” he asks.

“The mess,” she says. She can faintly hear the music in the distance. “There’s a party to celebrate the declaration to reform the Galactic Senate.”

He stares at her. “Why aren’t you there with your friends?”

“Because I’d rather be here with you.”

“Rey…” He closes his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose. “You can’t keep doing this.”

She frowns. “What?”

“I saved your life so that you could _live_ it.”

“And I am.”

“No, you’re not.” He abruptly stands, a flare of his old temper that she didn't realize she had missed, but with its edges sanded down and softened. “You’re hiding away with me while life happens around you. Don’t you see that? You should be in there, with people you care about, celebrating what you fought for, not sitting out here by yourself in the dark.”

“I’m doing the best I can!” she says. Suddenly tears are climbing up her throat. “You don’t know what it’s like. To have to go on living, by myself, with no one who truly understands me, after knowing what it feels like _not_ to be alone.”

His anger dissipates on a sigh and he kneels before her. “Everyone is alone, Rey. You think your loneliness sets you apart from everyone else, but it’s what makes you the same. All of your friends, every other creature in this galaxy, feels what you feel deep down. Lonely and scared and…” He swallows. “And _aching_ for just one, tiny moment of connection to another person. That’s what living is supposed to feel like.”

A tear rolls down her cheek, and he reaches out as though he could catch it.

“What you and I had, it’s not meant for this world,” he says. “It couldn’t last. But it doesn’t mean you get to give up.”

“Like you did?” she accuses.

“You’re stronger than me.” His voice is soft and low. “In the ways that mattered, you always were. I think… I think that I’m doing you more harm than good by being here.”

She doesn’t have to hear his thoughts or feel his feelings to know what he’s contemplating. She knows the language of his face, so his expression is an open book to her.

“No, Ben,” she says, desperate, wishing more than ever that she could touch him, could _hold onto him_. “Don’t do this.”

His face is like glass about to shatter. “I have to.”

“No, you don’t! I’ll do better!” she says. “I’ll do whatever you want, just don’t go.”

“Rey…”

“Don’t leave me,” she says, tears blurring her vision. “Please.”

He presses his face close to hers, and she almost thinks she can feel his breath on her skin.

“I’ll always be here,” he says.

And then he’s gone.

***

She screams his name into the darkness over and over, begging him to come back.

But he doesn’t.

The revelers can’t hear her cries over the music, so none of them come either.

She lies on the grass, staring up at the stars as the tears dry on her cheeks, truly alone again.

***

She sits on her rock looking out over the trees. _Be with me, be with me, be with me_ playing on a loop in her head like it has been for weeks.

“Hey, I’ve been looking for you,” a voice says behind her and then Finn is sitting down at her side. “You’re a hard person to find these days.”

“Yeah, sorry about that,” she says. She’s rarely strayed from her quarters since Ben left her, and she knows how strange that must seem to everyone else since they don’t know what she’s grieving.

“It’s okay, I just…” He takes her hand, giving her palm a squeeze. “Are _you_ okay?”

She looks down at their intwined fingers, remembering the first time he’d ever reached for her hand, how affronted she’d been, not knowing that he was as desperate for connection as she secretly was. And they had given that to each other, for the first time in both of their lives.

She suddenly throws her arms around his neck. “You’re a good friend,” she says, voice thick with unshed tears.

His arms, momentarily frozen in surprise, come around her, holding her close. “You, too.”

She clasps him tighter. It’s not the love of another soul filling up the empty parts of her, but it’s enough to soothe the ache and remind her that life can still be sweet and good.

“Do you want to talk about it?” he asks her.

She wipes away her tears and smiles. “No.”

“Do you want to go down to the lake for a swim with Rose and me?”

She takes his hand and lets him pull her up off the rock. “Yes.”

***

She lives her life.

She serves as an advisor to the Senate, connecting the galaxy’s new leaders to the wisdom of Jedis past.

She ties the laces on Finn’s shoes when his hands are trembling too hard to do it himself and stands beside him, smiling through her tears, as he marries the woman he loves.

She opens a school to teach Force-sensitive children, not how to use it as a weapon but how to appreciate it as an energy that connects everyone and everything to each other.

She sometimes still wakes up feeling the ghost of arms around her and sometimes talks to someone she can’t be sure is listening, but she soothes the aloneness deep in her soul by trying to love as many people around her as she can.

And when she takes her final breaths, surrounded by the family she chose for herself, she thinks he would be proud of the life she’s lived.

***

She stands at the foot of the bed, looking down at her body and her loved ones gathered around it. She wishes she could touch them, let them know she’s all right. She looks down at her hands, which are young and strong once more.

And then she feels it. The stream is flowing again, the joy and tenderness of it washing over her.

A warm handle settles on her shoulder, and she takes a deep, shuddering breath before turning slowly.

He’s smiling down at her, the way he only ever did once in life, and he looks more beautiful and perfect than she ever could have imagined.

“Ben?” she says. She's waited so long for this moment and now she's hardly able to believe he’s real.

He takes her face in his hands, running his thumb over her cheekbone and jawline, drinking in the sight of her, and then he leans forward, pressing kisses to her eyebrow and temple and the shell of her ear and the spot where her shoulder meets her neck. She wraps her arms around him, trying to obliterate any distance between them once and for all.

“I was always right here,” he says.

She nods. “I know.”

And then they move together, their lips meeting, and the stream becomes an ocean she would happily drown in, the lines between what’s him and what’s her blurring until they’re just them.

“It’s time,” he whispers against her lips.

“I’m ready,” she says.

And then he takes her hand, pulling her forward into forever.


End file.
